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Improve notification options for new available updates

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User story

We would like to have way to receive notifications if an update for the PRTG Network Monitor application is available. This notification should also provide a link to the changelog containing the details the new version.

Details of user story

Our specific use case is the following:

We are an MSP that manages different applications which are used by our teams to provide services to customers, one of these applications is the PRTG Network Monitor. We run PRTG on multiple servers. One of our recurring operational tasks is updating the PRTG Network Monitor application whenever updates are available. Since updates cause downtime we run updates in a maintenance window, which involves planning and notifying stakeholders that updates will take place.

Currently we manually check whether or not an update is available and then start the rest of the update process. In order to (automatically) streamline this process it would be helpful to receive a notification that an update is available, this also helps us to start the process as soon as an update is available. In some cases we have to check this daily because we are waiting for an update/hotfix to be available which fixes an issue on of our teams/customer is facing.

We have a Microsoft Teams channel that we use to receive notifications on new software updates from different vendors for the applications we manage. The methods we currently use to receive these notifications in the channel are the following:

  • Receiving update notifications by e-mail, which are sent to the e-mail address for this Microsoft Teams channel which then post the message in our channel
  • Subscribing to an RSS feed which posts updates to the RSS feed to the Microsoft Teams channel using the built-in RSS connector

We would like to receive a message in this channel as soon as a new PRTG update is available. The reason why this is important to us is that we we first of all want to receive notifications of a new available version for business critical applications on a single location, rather than having to (manually) check if new versions are available for every application separately using separate tooling.

We have had contact with the support team where we have asked if there is a possible solution available. They indicated that there is an option we can use, which is to use the ticketing system within PRTG.

Their suggestion was to adjust the following in "Setup -> Auto-Update -> Settings": - Automatically download and install the latest version - Automatically download the latest version and alert the admin - Alert the admin only

The last 2 options could trigger a notification by e-mail, which would be sufficient for our use case.

However this option is not workable for use because of the following: The “Automatically download the latest version and alert the admin” and “Alert the admin only” options create a ticket for the PRTG System Administrator. However we turned off e-mail alerts for this account because there are a lot of tickets created which are not relevant for us. We only want to receive an e-mail alert whenever a new update is available.

Acceptance criteria

  • We can receive notifications whenever a new update is available
  • The notification body text contains a link to the changelog
  • The notification can be sent/received by systems separate from PRTG (for example a Microsoft Teams channel)
  • The method used to subscribe to PRTG update notifications allows for only receiving notifications about a new version for PRTG Network Monitor (and/or other software provided by Paessler)

Status

Open

core-installation improve-prtg installation prtg-kbtracker rss-feed

Created on Apr 20, 2021 10:59:32 AM

Last change on Apr 23, 2021 8:29:52 AM by  Florian Lesage [Paessler Support]



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